In general, I support the idea of a more permanent record of events. One of the things that I always liked about the wiki was that there was a history that you could read, and learn about what has gone before. Having the game itself record the history of the world on the wiki as a series of discreet event pages would be amazing.

The problem is how to implement it. In order to make a proper timeline, each event needs to have its own page. So if three huge battles occurred on EC, the game would have to make three wiki pages. This could quickly generated a gigantic amount of pages. For example:

One huge battle for each island: 7 pagesTwo takeovers: 2 pagesSo, 9 pages for that turn.Then two turns per day, so, 18 pages.Seven days a week: 126 pagesAdd in a hero death, four elections, a war declaration, a cease fire, and maybe one more miscellaneous event: 134 pages a week.52 weeks a year: 6,968 pages.

And those aren't even eventful weeks. There are a lot more events that could be documented as well: Lordship appointments, religion foundings, duchy creations and dissolutions, ducal appointments, region transfers, etc.

The wiki currently only has 8,789 pages. (Content pages, not counting talk and meta pages.)

Assuming we want to increase our page count by well over 7,000 pages a year, with pages that mostly have no content other than a set of semantic properties, we have to come up with a naming scheme to ensure that each page has a unique name. And the name should preferably be meaningful, too. I image this wouldn't be too hard. But you'd probably end up with something like:

(Or you could do it with subpages, or something, to help keep things segregated.)

The pages could also be automatically categorized according to island, realms involved, region (if applicable), diplomacy change, etc.

We could design templates for each particular event type, and the game output could be coded to use the template. That would provide a decent looking page. By default the content of the page could include the text of the game-wide message that is sent out.

If this were done, you could really do some interesting things with it. Each island could have its own timeline on its main page. People could click on the events on the timeline, and go to that page. They could post notes on that event, or RPs, or whatever other things they wanted to say about it.

You could put timelines on region pages, showing events for that region, including things like: Lordship changes, allegiance change, battles, TOs, etc. Each event would be automatically linked to a page about that event.

Then the real challenge comes in with this: Someone needs to figure out how to do it. (Which really means Anaris has to figure out how to do it.) Sure, we could help by doing some research into how to do automated edits. But it would still come down to Anaris writing the actual code that would do the work.

As to the original post. While the item time line is fun, the fact that 90% of the item page never have anything more then bare bones content is not. Having thousands of battle pages with nothing but the auto generated info does not make for a good wiki.

I have no really coding experience, but if the information was presented to me I could do at least a weekly digest of events. For this, it almost seems to me either a player driven wiki or google doc would be most appropriate.

One option would just be to autogenerate a timeline for each continent on a single wiki page. It wouldn't be perfect and the pages could get quite long but at least it would be better than the total gaps in history we periodically get for each continent. It would also make it a lot easier in terms of giving people a starting point to write histories of the game.

One option would just be to autogenerate a timeline for each continent on a single wiki page. It wouldn't be perfect and the pages could get quite long but at least it would be better than the total gaps in history we periodically get for each continent. It would also make it a lot easier in terms of giving people a starting point to write histories of the game.